The Megyn Kelly Show - Parents Pushed to Breaking Points, COVID Child Abuse, and Why the Corporate Press Hates Joe Rogan, with Dave Smith | Ep. 260

Episode Date: February 11, 2022

Megyn Kelly is joined by Dave Smith, libertarian stand-up comedian and host of the "Part of the Problem" podcast, to talk about the lack of COVID accountability, the elitism on display in the disdain for the Canadian trucker protest, the corporate media's contempt for the working class, parents being pushed to their breaking points and fighting back, the cultural drift and indoctrination at schools, COVID child abuse, Biden's disastrous interview with Lester Holt, the war on terror turning on the right now, how the Democrats and GOP have changed over the last 20 years, the real reason the corporate press and cancel culture mob hate Joe Rogan, how Rogan is dealing with the backlash, professional jealousy, crumbling American cities, the inflation crisis, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. It's Friday. Yes, we made it. What's happening in the world? Well, Canada's Freedom Convoy protest continues with talk of U.S. truckers disrupting the Super Bowl. New York is set to fire thousands of unvaccinated government workers. Still, they're still holding on to this as of now. And Joe Biden can't explain what what temporary inflation is or when it will end and instead goes after Lester Holt as a wise guy. He's a wise guy. This is another parent is physically assaulted for not wearing a mask sure it's going well but we're gonna laugh instead of cry today happy to bring to you stand up comedian libertarian and host of the podcast part of the problem dave smith hey dave how's it

going hey megan thank you for having me on i don't know i don't know if i can promise to make good on that uh laughing rather than crying but we could cry together. That'd be fine. We're going to try it. We're going to try it. I love that part of the problem, by the way. I love because I just whenever there's something it's like hashtag part of the problem and it's a thing. So way to embrace it. Lean into it. Yes, that's the idea. All right. So you are, as I understand it, pretty much a lifelong New Yorker. Grew up in Brooklyn and you're from, but like parts park slope, which

you tell me, cause I think you, I heard you describe yourself as sort of lower middle class, but parks look these days is where all this nudie journalists live and it's anything but middle class. Yeah, it was, it was a much different area in the eighties and nineties when I grew up there, it was, it was coming up. coming up. It wasn't like a terrible neighborhood or anything like that, but you didn't have to be a multimillionaire to live there as you do today. But yeah, it was much more. I feel like I was born in 1983, and I think I was like the last generation of,

like our parents just told us to go outside and play. And we just did that. We had block parties. The kids got into fights and there was no adult around to report back to. You were just expected to kind of handle it. And yeah, and everybody in Brooklyn was from Brooklyn, which is very different than today. My dad was from Brooklyn, definitely working class, but he was born in 1940. But he was always very proud of it. He loved being from Brooklyn. He passed in the 80s. But I'd say, we'd say, Dad, what about Brooklyn or New York? Brooklyn is the largest of the five boroughs of New York. It's like part of his identity. But man, I went there to a party when I was at Fox, I don't know, maybe 2013, 2014. I was like, okay, fine. I'm going to see my friends at their townhouse. And you know what I got from like more than one person? How do you sleep at night working for Fox News? And I remember saying like, I sleep great. It checks cash and I feel like we're providing service to the nation.

It's like practically getting hissed at when I entered the rooms. Yeah, there is an unbelievable elitism that has come to dominate the wealthy areas in New York City. And I think probably over the last couple of years, their contempt for the working class has been more on display than ever, even though they consider themselves to be like the champions of the working class. It's a very interesting, absurd dichotomy. Yeah. And the way you champion the working class is to fire 3000 of them for not getting the jab, which looks like at least as of now, it's going to happen today in New York City for the remaining public service workers who haven't gotten the vaccine, which is so absurd right now, Dave, given that especially at this point in the pandemic, we know the vaccine only helps you. It doesn't help prevent the spread. So there is no public health necessity. The hospitals are not overwhelmed for to insist that people get this vaccine to keep working. Yeah. And what's so fascinating is that it was the heroes in 2020, way back then, the essential workers, the nurses and the truck drivers or like all these people who were in New York City, they were like giving them applause every day at 6 p.m. when

they came home. But now that so a a group specifically the nurses who had worked for about a year and a half, uh, you know, in a situation where almost all of them either got COVID or had figured out how to protect themselves from COVID they're, they're all going to get fired just because they didn't want to take this pharmaceutical product that as, as you correctly pointed out, it's not going to stop you from getting it or stop you from spreading it to other people. And particularly with this Omicron variant, I mean, there's, look, I know you're like not supposed to question these things, but I look at the data in Israel where they're 90% double vaccinated, 80% boosted. They're giving out their fourth vaccine to people 65 and older. And they just, in the last few few weeks set their daily record for new cases

and for new deaths. It's just that, you know, the follow the science crowd has no scientific argument for why we should be firing people who don't want to get the vaccine. I was opposed to the mandates when we had Delta and we still could say that the vaccines might provide you with some protection against contracting it. Not really that much, but some, some. Certainly we were still using the term breakthrough cases because the vaccine was supposed to stop, you know, them from breaking through. And obviously they weren't as good with Delta from preventing transmission as they were with the original strain of the virus. But now it's a joke. Now it's just you fire these guys for what? Now it's just like, well,

we kind of set the policy. So we're going to see it through. Why? What's this is just punitive at this point. And we thought Mayor Adams would be a little bit more reasonable. So far on COVID, he really hasn't been. Yeah. And it was his very first thing that he did when he came in was extend the, all the emergency powers. And it's, yeah, that was, that was certainly disappointing. And it's also as if, and I don't mean, I'm not presenting this as if this is some grand conspiracy from the very beginning, but as we all know, there are incentives at work here and there's certainly these giant pharmaceutical companies who stand to just rake in billions of dollars if you have to continue, if you're mandated in order to keep

your job or to go to a restaurant or just live a normal life. And so now there's all these perverse incentives to keep this thing going when it just makes absolutely no sense. And of course, almost every study confirms at this point that natural immunity is stronger and many of them suggest much longer lasting than than the vaccine. So why would it be that you can't? Hey, if I got a positive test from two months ago, why can't that be good enough to be a citizen with full rights under the law. And on top of that, just the idea that New York City has actually created this two-tiered class system where one group of people do not have basic rights to participate in society the way others do, like discrimination under the law. And this is not like, whoa, what are we doing here? This- Well, I agree with you. And I read something you said, and I was like, oh my God, I get this guy. And I love what you were saying. You're saying the one thing that

really gets your blood boiling is when they try to return our rights to us under the following three conditions. It's like they kidnap your kid and they say, I will do you the favor of returning your child to you if you do the following three things. And then, you know, if you do the following three things, maybe you'll get your kid. Maybe you won't. But if they give your kid back to you, you're supposed to say, thank you so much, benevolent leader. Yeah, there's it's like no one thinks anymore in a serious way about what the role of government ought to be and what the nature of rights ought to be. And the idea that the government can just kind of do what they decide they want to and then reward you with these rights, treating them as if these are like state granted privileges is appalling to me. And I remember when Governor Murphy in New Jersey said on Tucker

Carlson's show back in, I think it was in May of 2020, when he asked him, well, where do you get the authority? He had arrested people for going to synagogue. He goes, well, where do you get the authority? This is clearly a constitutionally protected right. He said, who gave you the authority to suspend the Bill of Rights? Yeah. And he said, well, I wasn't thinking about the Bill of Rights. He said it was above my pay grade. Yeah, it's above my pay grade. Well, then don't touch it. But it's above your pay grade to try to undo it. Yeah, no, it's actually exactly your pay grade. This is this is quite literally what you're paid for is is to, you know, run a state government. And you yeah yeah, it's people, you do not have the right to do this. And the idea of rights is a moral construct. It's not, nobody's ever argued that governments are

incapable of violating people's rights. But the idea is that you morally are not permitted to do that. And man, if this country is going to survive this whole thing, we really need to get back that idea, which is a big part of why this country was so successful ever. Yeah. I'm trying to, I was just looking up the exact quote, but yeah, it was pretty crazy. And Tucker did a great job of that guy. The other night he had a SOP montage where you sort of go through and pick sound bites and put them together of all the craziness that happened during the pandemic with people um you know just cracking down like arresting the uh the paddle boarder in the middle of the ocean he was alone by himself and i think

it was in california they arrested this guy but yeah to your point you know what what did our founders say you know we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal that that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. And among these, you know, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. OK, these governors and even worse than the governors, it's like these little bureaucrats below them or Fauci or, you know, or Rochelle Walensky, who's never been elected to do anything, started taking them away. And now that they're finally being forced because of the politics, now they want to claim the science has changed. It hasn't. The politics have changed. Now they're sort of they want us to pat them on the back for returning

our unalienable rights to us. Right. It's like the victory lap being taken by these Democrats, like you're welcome. Like Hakeem Jeffries earlier this week, Biden crushed the virus. No, he didn't. Who do you think you're kidding? Yeah, no, absolutely. And and the fact is that while you see like the entire corporate press kind of freaking out about misinformation, disinformation online. What they just refuse to do is have an ounce of introspection and ask themselves, well, why is it that trust in institutions all throughout this country have completely crumbled? And the corporate press is one of the biggest ones that has, I mean, trust in media, the numbers of people who are actually even listening or subscribing to newspapers or watching cable news has plummeted

and and this is because it's not just that they're wrong about everything but they're so dishonest and there's no sense of of admitting it so like you know if you look at the the lockdowns the original lockdowns which in my opinion were like one of the greatest crimes uh perpetrated on the american people by their governments i I mean, this Johns Hopkins study comes out, it pretty clearly demonstrates they had no measurable effect. And they destroyed lives. And not just the people who died as a result of them. I mean, the hundreds of thousands of small businesses, the children who have been completely stunted in their development, childhood obesity up something like 50%, that you would think in a sane society that the people who pushed for those lockdowns and

implemented them, at the very least, should never be near public policy again. And they should at least have to admit, man, we got the biggest thing ever wrong. But there's none of that. It's just like, oh, the science has changed. But no, we're talking about what the science was back then, while people who were against the lockdowns were completely demonized. leads me to what's happening in Canada, because you mentioned the class issue here, you know, the working class, the Democrats used to be the party, the working class. They're clearly not anymore. They're losing working class voters by the boatload. Trump was picking them up. The Republicans continue to pick them up. The Democrats are the party of the elites now, the college educated elites, or at least the ones who don't really give two shits about the working class. And it's kind of manifesting in like a microcosm up in Canada, which I basically consider you a Canadian because I know you went to college in Oneonta, right? So it's like, yeah.

Yeah, right. I guess that's true. The winters felt pretty Canadian. They're terrible. I went to Syracuse for college and lived up there too. So we're basically Canadian. We can speak to this. But what's happening up there is really extraordinary, right? Like the dam burst, the Canadians took it. Unlike here, there wasn't as much pushback. You know, even their conservative leaders kind of abandoned them and shut up and enforced

all this nonsense. And it took the working class truckers to say, F this, we're just not going to do this anymore. Yeah. Well, I think also it's probably a combination of that and also that they were pushed a bit further than the Americans were, you know, so you kind of wonder where people's breaking points are. And it seems constantly like the kind of ruling elite is flirting with that. Like, how far can we push you? You know, what if we destroy your business? What if we say we're going to propagandize your children to hate you? Is that, you know, like how far before you finally snap? And I'm like, well,

no, we're doing something about this. And then, of course, they'll call you a terrorist or a racist or whatever the name is. But one of the things that's really interesting about this, this mass trucker protest and other protesting as well, but specifically with the truckers is that it's, it's very easy for like, I was talking before about kind of the elitism in these like wealthy liberal areas. It's very easy for people in today's day and age to be disconnected from how much they sit on top of the work that blue collar workers do. And I, by the way, I'm including myself in this.

I'm not like saying like, I mean, you know, I'm sitting here in like, you know, uh, in my office, in my home, there's heat, there's, you know, there's electricity, there's, there's an internet connection. There's all of these things that blue collar workers worked very hard to provide for me. And I just get them and I don't have to think about it that much. And that's true for all of us. And we're very disconnected from how powerful truckers are. Our society still runs on truckers getting things from point A to point B and things

all fall apart very quickly without them. So it is truly like a kind of reclaiming of power that the working class has that they have not exercised for a very long time. And, you know, as you pointed out with Donald Trump carrying the working class vote, that in itself should have been something to really open people's eyes in America. But of course, no one wanted to examine that. But the working class in this country and many others across the Western world has been screwed over for decades. And this now, over the last couple of years, they have absolutely just been decimated. And so I just I love it. I think it's wonderful to see them standing up. I think that, you know, the party

in control, right, the Democrats running the country right now, certainly the media that supports them, they don't they don't really want the working class. They look down on them. Hillary Clinton's deplorables thing was wider than we knew. I mean, it was go back to Obama with, you know, the bitter clingers. There really is a snobbery amongst these so-called elites with their Harvard, whatever. They do think they're better. And they think the truckers are dumb

and that they need to be punished for their own good. I mean, right now, the headline this morning, I saw in the Daily Mail before I came in here, Ontario declares a state of emergency. Now, this is under President Biden urging Justin Trudeau to get even tougher. OK, so what are they doing? And this is this is put in place by the conservative, the conservative Ontario premier, which is a weird thing to call a leader anyplace outside of like czarist Russia. conservative Doug Ford is saying the drivers can be fined $100,000 now. They can be jailed for up to a year, these truckers. They're going to have the trucks seized. Okay, good luck with that. And they may revoke the licenses of these truckers. So good old protests in the streets, you know, your favorite or don't, depending on your politics, obviously. But this is going to get more and more problematic because it's not just about the truckers anymore up there in Canada. It's about Canadians trying to push for their own freedoms. And now Americans are forming their own trucker convoy and are ready to push too.

Yeah, it'll be interesting to see where this all goes. And of course, a trucker strike or something like that, these things can be very painful. And I don't think any of us wish more pain on the American people. But I think there's a growing feeling that we're running out of options here. And that there's really that what can the American people do who want to get back to living in a somewhat normal, somewhat free society? And besides move to Florida or South Dakota or something like that, like what are the options for the rest of us? And it seems like there's not many, and this is one of them. But I think what you said there is absolutely spot on. And it's something that just I find like infuriating is this kind of, you know, you see it all the time, even when they're not like,

like when the establishment corporate press, when liberal elites talk about their own cultural values, it's almost like this implicit contempt for the working class. The values of, say, the woke kind of political correctness stuff. Could you think of anything? I mean, has anyone ever been on a job site or hung out with a trucker or been around working class people. These people do not, this is like, you know, upper middle class university values that the worst thing you can do is like say something that's offensive to some group. This is not how working class people feel. This is not a representation. And by the way, this stuff is also not a representation of how like working class minorities feel. They're not like this.

There's, you know, I grew up in Brooklyn and I've hung out in like the hood before and stuff. And like, these people are not concerned about saying no, no words. They're not concerned about someone hurting someone's feelings. They like offensive jokes. They like all of this stuff. This is you, Mr. You know, like Ivy League educated part. You know, it's obviously like someone who's never been through anything in their life that thinks microaggressions are an issue. No one who's actually been through something believes

that. This is exactly right. And this, of course, is at the heart of your pal Joe Rogan's huge success. He's an everyman and he understands what the everyman wants to talk about and how they talk and because he genuinely is that person. And I know you've spent the past couple of nights with him in the wake of all this whole scandal. So I'd love to ask you after this break about the tale of two Joes, Joe Rogan, and Joe Biden getting very testy with Lester Holt last night. He was basically like, L continues, right? Even to our point about like, we know this stuff is not working. Cloth mask is a joke. The vaccine protects only you potentially from severe illness.

That I really do believe. So if you look at the charts on like who's in the hospital, way, way, way, way more unvaccinated getting sick if they get COVID than those who get covid and who have been vexed but it's a personal choice you can't mandate it anyway um the the school board meetings are continuing right and parents have been ticked off about crt in the schools and the radical trans ideology in the schools and like the totally inappropriate sex messaging for the kids in the schools and all the while we're keeping our kids muzzled behind these masks nonstop when we know it's bullshit, especially the cloth mask, which is what all the kids wear. Right. So this dad goes, this is upstate New York. His name is Dave Callis. And he gets tossed from a school board meeting this year, this this week because he refused to put his mask on and the security guard went after him

like he had just committed a felony. Watch this. Oh, they found him. Look it. They found him. We're in America. Oh, time to... Look at this. Look at this. Look... What are you doing? What the fuck are you doing? What are you doing? What are you doing? Is this how you treat our children too? What are you doing?

You put your hands on the children like that too, sir. Holy crap. That's assault. That is assault. Oh my God. Oh my God. Doing that to the children too? Holy shit.

What the fuck are you doing? What are you doing? That's ridiculous. Honestly, you would have thought he was some sort of a kidnapper. Yeah. I mean, I'm like, I'm uncomfortable saying publicly what I think should happen to some of these people. And, you know, it's like we were saying before, like they're, you know, they're pushing people. You know, it's like they had that whole, like the Justice Department said the thing about them being terrorists and stuff like this, the concerned parents, which, of of course is like absurd and so appalling on its

face. But, uh, you know, now I have kids, I have two, they're, you know, very young, they're below school age, um, right now, but I can, I can kind of understand a little bit more that, you know, you might make that terrorist claim come true at some point, you know, you're, you're messing with people's children. This is something that people will die for. This is not a joke. This is like, if you're talking about you want to muzzle my child and propagandize them with an ideology that I detest, that is something that is actually worth dying for. And I'm truly concerned about how far they can push good people before they will do things, you know? And of course, I'm not advocating anything like that.

No, you're raising a red flag saying that you don't want to see it happen. Right. You know, but it's like this. It really is like the mix of everything, what they're doing. You know, there's there's a lot of things that people can put up with, but you don't come after someone's children and what they're doing to children is, is just, I mean, it's a, I can't express how appalling it is. Yeah, I know. And you're right because you take a man like that. He's not bothering anybody. You know, he's sitting there, he doesn't have his mask on. And in New York state, as of Wednesday,

the indoor mask mandate was lifted anyway, right? But he happened to be in a school and they haven't lifted another school. Well, that's for the children. You're telling me that guy just randomly sitting. He can sit next door in a restaurant and with the same amount of people. And that's fine. But him choosing not to put it on at the school board meeting makes it somehow extra viral. He knew that was bullshit. So he took a stand.

The cop could have gone over the cop. I mean, I used to date the son of a cop and they used to call these sort of pretend cops square badges. So he would have said that square badge, the square badge goes over to him, give him a little bit of power. He becomes drunk on it and decides to tear the father out of there like he's really committed a harm. And that man's children go to that school. You're right. And you think about how that makes him feel. And we're coming off of two years now of people being shamed for speaking their mind. Michael Brendan Doherty had a great term on the National Review earlier today. Hold on. I wrote it down because it's it's we know we've heard the argument made, but I just like the way he put it. He was talking about Canada. He said they tried to cast the normal left wing culture spells on the truckers. You're racist.

You're bigots. I like that. The normal left wing culture spells. And that's what they do to any parent who speaks up, you know, whether it's about masking or vaxxing or CRT or the trans stuff. And parents, they are at their breaking point. The kids are at their breaking point. And it's only the politicians coming to grips with that that is

finally changing the policies. Yeah, exactly. And I think what we were talking about before kind of touches on this same thing, you know, where it's like the contempt for working class and lower middle class Americans. I mean, I know like you've you've publicly talked about pulling your kids out of the crazy schools in New York. I'm very fortunate that like my career is going very well. I have a lot of options of what I can do. I will, my children will not be in this situation, but if you're, you know, a working class parent, who's already just getting hit really hard with property taxes, you may not have the financial option to do anything else because of course you're already forced to pay for the public schools. Maybe you

can't afford to move. You can't afford private school. You can't afford these other options. So those people are the ones who are stuck with this. And of course we know, you know, all, I mean, we could spend the entire rest of the show just listing progressive Democrats, you know, who send their kids to private schools. It's like all of them. And so, you know, again, this is who it falls on. This is this is who it falls square squarely on is these like lower middle class, working class parents who have no other options but to confront this. And I will I give that dad credit for not clocking that guy. He would have been completely within his rights to, he, he demonstrated a, I think a good amount of restraint.

So good for him for that. Crazy to witness, you know, yes, I did pull my kids and I have to say, we had a really interesting guy in the show last week who was, he wrote a whole book about how people sort of naturally go along with the group mentality. It's a human instinct to want to belong to the group. It's a survival instinct. You know, it's baked in us whether we want it or not. And it's the thing that makes you not say your opinion

when you think the majority is not going to share my opinion. And he was saying in a study after study shows, if you say your opinion, you will find out you're probably not in the minority. You probably are the majority. There is a silent majority on a lot of these issues. And you need only speak up and try to see whether it's true. And I will tell you, I haven't told a story, but just this week, I moved my kids. My husband and I moved our kids to new schools. We moved out of New York City because of this week. I moved my kids, my husband and I moved our kids to new schools. We moved out of New York City because of this stuff. And my daughter's school needs a new head of school

because the existing head is, she's leaving. She's been there a long time. She's, I think, retiring. So they're looking for a new head of school. So we're a little concerned, right? It's like, I don't know what we're going to get. This is what actually happened at my boy's old school. They got a new head of school and he was this far left guy who was very woke and completely changed the, you know, not have said how I felt because I would have been worried. People would have thought, oh, I'm standing on an issue that's, I'm somehow against diversity or something. But I said explicitly, I did it. I said, this is my name. This is how I feel. We pulled our kids from these schools because DEI, while it has a nice name, diversity, equity, and inclusion, it's actually really toxic. It's leading to massive division within parents in our old school and children within our old school.

The school Dalton now I have a friend who goes there. Students are sitting by race at lunchtime. They're sitting by race. So I'm like, we don't we don't want that. We're not looking for, quote, a change agent. We actually think things here are going well and we don't want somebody coming in and forcing their ideological politics on our children or our parent body. And, you know, you put yourself out there a little. Right. Lo and behold, you know what happened, Dave? Other parents started raising their hands saying, we agree. We agree. We agree. It wasn't unanimous, but I felt supported. And I was like, you know, the guy was right. You need the guy to take the mask off. You need the parents to stand up. You need the person to say the things that are unpopular or that you think are. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. I completely agree with that. That's really beautiful. And it reminds me, there's this story in the Soviet Union. I believe it was in 1988, but internet people, you could double check me on that. I might be a little bit off. You guys, they always figure out. If you get something wrong, they always let you know. I'll find out on Twitter. But it was the Pope came and visited

the Soviet Union. And he hadn't come in a very long time because as you know, the commies were not too friendly with religion. And hundreds of thousands of people came out to see him. And a lot of people who were living in the Soviet Union at the time credit this as being like a big game changer, because it's not just that they came out, but they saw that so many other people still held these like religious views that they were kind of holding secretly because they were afraid of the regime. And there's something about that, like that really, because you're right, we do have this instinctual desire, because of course, it makes perfect sense as a survival mechanism. You don't want to be, you know, ostracized, being ostracized by the group means you die

in most of human history. So of course, you don't want that. But as soon as you realize that there's numbers with you, people become much more courageous. And so that's, I do think what we need are people doing what you did there. We need people to be like, okay, I'm going to be the first one who's going to stand up and say something. And, and that can really like lead a lot of other people to be comfortable to say, yeah, we agree with that too. And I just, you know, the thing is like this, this game that they play this trickery where it's like, well, we're just for diversity and equity and inclusion and all of this. It's like, no, what I am passionately against that I will make sure my little girl and my little boy never grow up believing in is racialism because it's poisonous.

It's so poisonous to see people as defined by their immutable characteristics. The whole point of the history of, you know, like the racist movements and anti-racist movements is that the anti-racist movements were always saying race shouldn't be that important. And it shouldn't be the center of the first thing you think about. best as possible achieve a world where like my kids look at some kid and that's not the thing they think of as being the most important defining characteristic about them. They just like judge them as an individual. And so that's, you know, that's what the whole thing is against. It's against this latest form of racialism, which is it's like pure poison. You know, it's in a way it's I was thinking about this the other day, because when adults talk about race, they'll say he's white, she's black, he's Asian. Right. If you listen to how little kids talk about it, they'll say he's about my height. He has black skin and brown eyes. They they their instincts are in no way to define the human with the color or the culture or the race. That's not who they are. We're making them into that. And we have to object.

Yeah, absolutely. And the other thing is that kids are also very malleable. So they follow their kind of program to follow the lead of what adults said for them. So you can make them into somewhat, as is clearly demonstrated, look, if you look at what public schools were teaching in the Jim Crow South or what government schools in Nazi Germany or what, you can make kids be very racialist and really see that very quickly. It's a very, very dangerous game to play. You know what? On that front, in New York City, where's Poly Prep? Is it in Brooklyn?

I'm not sure, but- It's in Brooklyn. It's in Brooklyn. Okay, so Poly Prep is a school that's decided to defy Kathy Hochul's, well, she's defying. Basically, a court order ruled the indoor mask mandates were illegal.

She didn't have the power to do it. And then, and that would have included the schools. And then she appealed, and they got a stay of that court's ruling so it's playing out in the courts well poly prep said we're taking them off taking the masks off of our kids which i was like okay um and and it's not just happening at poly prep it's happening at other schools now too there was a video where is from, Deb? I had my team make it because I saw it online of the children cheering. Do we have it? Asking my team. Yeah, OK.

I can't remember where this is in Poly Prep, but look at this. OK, this is the children celebrating when they found out in another location that they didn't have to wear their masks anymore. Watch. Starting tomorrow, we don't have to wear masks anymore. Look at that, Dave. Look at that. OK, so my point is, so you can see the joy, but my friends who have kids in the New York City school system are, say the children in New York, a lot of my friends' kids and so on, are ripping on the kids at Poly Prep, ripping on kids like this, this is Vegas, saying they're being totally irresponsible. They don't understand how important the masks are. Can you believe what they've done at these schools endangering the children? So even the kids at these schools who are being brought up by these total COVID hawks, these paranoid Fauci disciples have been indoctrinated to believe I need this little tiny piece of cloth on my face to be safe.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was, well, for that video, it's, it's a very interesting thing. I actually, I saw that one online and it's like this, it's very strange because you see like these little cute kids celebrating. And so, you know, like right away, it's just like a very pleasant image, you know, little kids dancing and being happy, but then it almost immediately just makes you so furious that they did this to these kids for so long, you know? And I look at it like this. I say, look, just imagine if you could just imagine that COVID didn't exist, um, like, you know, way back times in 2019 or

whatever, you know, and imagine you just said you were going to treat kids this way, you know, over say like the common cold and the flu, we're going to mask them up, tell them about washing their hands, telling them to constantly be in fear of this floating abstraction. That is a microscopic germ. We would all immediately be like, that is an insane form of child abuse. I mean, you're, you're raising kids to be germaphobes. It's it'd be something on the level of like Munchausen by proxy, you know, like what are you doing? You can't raise kids to think about these things all the time. Well, okay, COVID does exist. So we're not living in that hypothetical, but do all of those other

concerns just go away? But you know, like we're still doing that to children. And of course, this is having like profound effects on them. and we're it's going to be generations before we see what the results of of all of this and and we may never be able to completely measure it but it's it's it's really just profoundly tragic what has been done to to children over the last almost two years now and it really it's a sign of a very sick society, I think, that you would ever, you know, like children should be what you protect first and foremost. You protect children. Everyone else can suffer before the children do.

The idea that like, like I have, you know, older people who I really love, you know, but the idea that we would protect older people at the expense of children, I find to be profoundly sick and backward. And all of the older people in my life who I love, they would sacrifice their lives for their grandchildren. They would give up everything to make sure that their grandchildren had a great childhood. And I certainly would do that for my children and grandchildren gladly. So it's just

it's so disturbing. Well, and it would have been one thing, especially on the masks, if we had any real data showing that they work. But we have the opposite. And our leaders, Rochelle Walensky, continues to lie about her fake mask studies, which have been debunked. And when independent journalists, smart, honest journalists like David Zweig of New York Magazine and The Atlantic call her up to say this study was bullshit. Why? Why do you keep citing it? He asks more elegantly than I just did. She ignores him. She won't give a response. Right. She just says, keep the masks on, keep them on forever. And this is why there was a recent poll showed only 31 percent of the people trust Fauci at this point. Only 13% of the people trust Biden for information on COVID. And we know why. We know why. All right, stand by. We didn't get to

the tale of two Joes, but thankfully we have Dave for the whole show. So we're going to get there shortly. Pay a bill, come right back. And in the meantime, don't forget, you can watch The Megyn Kelly Show live on Sirius XM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at noon east, and the full video show and clips by subscribing to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash megankelly. If you prefer an audio podcast, subscribe, download on Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. And there you'll find our full archives with more than 255 shows, including some past comedians like Tim Dillon in episode 60,

and Andrew Schultz in episode 74. I'm just giggling, thinking about a couple of the moments in those shows, both of which I personally went back and listened to, which is always a sign it was a good show, right, if I just want to listen to it on my own free time. So Joe Biden gave an interview to Lester Ht that's going to play during the super bowl they do this every year right you choose the network airing the super bowl you sit with the host you give them an interview and a couple of highlights lowlights have been released um and here is joe biden i follow the science joe biden president i follow the science joe biden take a listen in recent days we've seen numerous governors from blue states roll back indoor mask requirements, essentially getting ahead of

the federal government, the CDC. Are those governors wrong? Well, it's hard to say whether they're wrong. Here's the science is saying now that masks work, masks make a difference. Should children be required to wear masks in schools? Well, look, when I got in office, only 46% of the schools were open. Now 98% of them are open and they're wearing masks. What's happening is every day that goes by, children are more protected. We're now on the verge of being able to have shots for children under the age of seven. Are you afraid, though, that some states and cities are moving too quickly to loosen indoor mask mandates? Well, you know, I committed that I would follow the science, the science as put forward by the CDC and the federal people. And I think it's probably premature, but it's a tough call.

It's a tough call, but might as well side on the side that hurts the children. Let's, let's just, let's go with the one that hurts the kids the most. Follow the science, follow the science, Dave. Um, I don't know. He, he talks about other States doing it too quickly. You know, maybe a little premature, but three weeks ago they were calling Glenn Youngkin, the devil for doing this three weeks later, tough call, maybe a little premature. Yeah, it's a tough call, Megan. I mean, you can't expect the president of the United States to make tough calls. I mean, come on, what do you want from the guy? I actually appreciate, every now and then Joe Biden blurts things out correctly, which I actually appreciate. He said,

I follow the science as the science is dictated by the CDC. You're like, yes, that's actually, that's more accurate than just this follow the science idea. And for him to say, if you really want to have a scientific conversation about this, for him to say, well, only 46% of schools were open and now it's up in the 90s. It's like, okay, but that's not really, that doesn't give you too much information. I'd like to know of those schools that were open back then, was there a disaster? Were people dying? Was COVID being spread more significantly in those areas? Because if not, and the answer is no, then the conclusion from that would be that all of these schools should have been open the whole time. So it's like we're not really having a scientific conversation when you're just bragging about where the rates are now as opposed to then. with this Omicron variant. I mean, if you have, like you said before, the only real argument

that's left from the vaccines is that it can maybe make you less likely to be hospitalized or die. But if you're talking about the likelihood of a healthy five-year-old being hospitalized or dying from COVID, I mean, you're talking about, I mean, for overall, it's like 99.9%. For a healthy five-year-old, it's going to be like just absurdly high odds. What difference are these vaccines really going to make? What are you telling me? It's going to be like 99.999, but now it's 99.9995 or something. The idea that that's like the silver bullet here that changes all of these dynamics is just it's the idea that you could claim that's following the science. It makes no sense at all. Well, it's so crazy, too, because I remember when Trump was

running, it was actually he had just lost. It was December of 2020. So he had lost, but he was claiming he didn't lose. And Joe Biden hadn't yet been inaugurated. And Trump was saying, look, when it comes to COVID, we are learning to live with it. We are learning to live with the virus. And Biden was like, learning to live with it. We are learning to die with it. I will shut COVID down. I will shut down the virus. Now, what did we hear from Phil Murphy this week, the governor of New Jersey? We're learning to live with COVID. We need to learn to live with it. It's not going away. It's endemic and it's time to take these restrictions down. Oh, suddenly he's not the devil. He's not a Glenn Youngkin, Donald Trump devil. It's fine. Tough

call. Biden, I follow the science. It's like he didn't fulfill his promise. And the thing is, it's not because covid cases are at record lows or the deaths are at record lows that any of these governors are doing it or that Biden's now more ambivalent. It's to the contrary. They're still at almost record highs, the case numbers and the death numbers are still very high. It's almost all of the very elderly, but they're still high. He did not shut down the virus. He saw new polling. The governors saw new polling and they're scared shitless and they should be. Yeah, no, that's exactly right. Right. It's like the science didn't change. It's what changed is people's unwillingness to put up with this stuff. So

and it's funny when you mentioned the thing with Trump, I mean, they used to do this all the time where, you know, like, it's like if Donald Trump said some really insane things, as you know, better than most. And he, you know, like there's plenty you could hit him for, but they would always go, you know, crazy when he said something completely reasonable to like, like, you know, it'd be funny. Like, would he be like, ah, you know, NATO was created to contain the soviet union and soviet union doesn't exist anymore so now we're just subsidizing the defense of rich you know european countries and they'd be like that's so appalling that you said that like do you have a response i mean do you like have you know right and so something like this

like we're gonna have to learn to live with it was the most just obviously factually correct thing. No prominent epidemiologist is actually going to argue with you that COVID is going away. It's not. We're going to learn to live with it. And hopefully, the trend that we've seen will continue where the variants continue to be more transmissible, more contagious, but less deadly. That's kind of the best that we can hope for. And there is, and these are people way smarter than me, but I've read a bunch of epidemiologists who argue that there is a high likelihood that this will happen because that's kind of what the evolutionary pressure on upper respiratory viruses tends to be. That, you know, the virus wants to survive

and you're more likely to survive and, you know, spread if you're, you know, you make the host less sick. Like the common cold is kind of the ultimate virus, right? Because it makes you just sick enough to cough and sneeze, but you're still healthy enough to go to work and cough and sneeze all over everything and spread it around. So that's what we're hoping for. And there does seem to be some indications that it's going in this direction. But yeah, the idea that we were going to get in there and we were going to stop COVID,

you know, for the people who talk about spreading misinformation, that was just an absolute knowing lie. Well, and the thing is, it's fine. I mean, I'm happy to deal with this version of COVID versus the more deadly strain, but we have to get rid of these, like the constant testing for everything and the constant vaccine mandates. It's like, you can't keep shutting things down because a kid gets COVID for five days or a worker gets COVID for five days. It can't go anywhere. That's not going to work. Learning to live with it means they all need to go, all these restrictions,

just like the UK is doing. And they'll do it and they'll do well with it. And then we'll ignore it. That's my that's my prediction on how it's going to go. Stand by. Up next, we are going to kick off our next discussion with Joe Rogan. I'm fascinated you've been with him the past couple of days in the midst of this whole storm. I know he's a good friend of yours.

He's been through the ringer this past week. And we will go there right after this quick break. Don't go away. I know a lot of people like they try to size me up. I feel I'll talk about these things. They're kind of like, what team are you on? And then I always have to let them know I'm not on either of your fucking teams. Like I'm not I'm not liberal or conservative. I I hate all of them. And I just wish there were more people like that. I hate them all. How do you not?

Every president of my lifetime is a piece of shit. Every one of them. They should all be thrown out of helicopters. That's the best solution I could possibly find. One-way helicopter rides for all of them. Salve a lot. I hate them all. But let's be honest.

They're all charming. They're all charming. And that is why Hillary Clinton is not president. That's it. That's the whole thing. I love it. My guest today is Dave Smith, libertarian, stand-up comedian, and host of the podcast, Part of the Problem. Dave, I get it. Trust me, my audience has heard me say a million times that I don't wear anybody's partisan jersey. I'm a registered independent, and there's no way I'm going to register for a party that would put me in the same group as Eric Swalwell on the one side or Matt Gates on the other. It's just not going to happen. No, hell no. We've got a home for you. We're doing some real cool stuff. Libertarianism. Yeah, that's right. Here, how about this? How about as just

a platform on this, end all the stupid wars, end all the COVID mandates and all the corporate bailouts, all the corporate welfare and give parents the complete control to dictate where their money goes in a school voucher system and that, you know, no more of these bureaucrats pushing propaganda on your children. How does that sound? This is why I heard you say you might run for president. You can represent the Libertarian Party better than most. Well, thank you. Is that going to happen? Is that just bluster? I am considering it. There's a lot of people who would like me to do that, but I haven't. I don't know. Well, I love the story because you kind of fell in love with Ron Paul, the father of Rand Paul, back in it was like a 2007 debate where he and Giuliani were

going after one another over whether the Iraq war made sense. And that was at the height of the Iraq war and the beheadings. And it was terrible, you know, seven right around the surge. And I've heard you tell a story about how that was like an aha moment for you on when it came to your own politics and sort of the beginning of your libertarianism. Yeah, well, I thought he was so, you know, I was like a liberal kid at the time, but I thought he was so on point on his arguments about, you know, like what a disaster American intervention in the Middle East has been. And then he kept arguing for like the purest of free markets. And I was like, wow, I really like him on the war thing. So I guess I'll look into this. And then the more I read about it, I was just I was converted. And, you know, as far as the war stuff goes, of course, like the you know, at this point,

it's basically universally accepted. You know, my a good friend of mine, Scott Horton, who he's the editor at Antiwar.com. He had this debate. Soho Forum is the organization, an Oxford style debate with Bill Kristol, who of course, I'm sure you know, and everybody knows is like one of the leading intellectual, you know, neocon hawks. He's like defines neocon. Yes. And there was a question and answer segment from the audience. And one guy asked a question of his, of him. And he said, Mr. Kristol, can you point what what is an example of a U.S. military intervention that you can point to that was a success?

And he said, well, I think the intervention in the Balkans. So even Bill Crystal had to go back to the 90s to find it. Even he cannot argue with a straight face that Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Niger, he can't point to one of these and even pretend that it was a success. But what you can point to is millions of dead civilians in these conflicts, trillions of dollars wasted. So, you know, I mean, I think just Ron Paul, it's hard to argue in hindsight that he was completely on the money with all of that stuff. And to me, one of the most fascinating political developments over the last five years or so is that the right wing in America has become much, much, much more anti-war. And that doesn't get discussed

very often, but like, you know, obviously Donald Trump, at least in rhetoric was, was very opposed to, to these wars. But you look at like these kind of big figures like Tucker Carlson and, you know, Laura Ingram and Ann Coulter and like all these people who were like real on board with the neocons have completely turned against that that foreign policy. And, you know, it's and then the corporate press's position is like, why does Tulsi Gabbard and Glenn Greenwald and all these people go on Tucker Carlson show? It must be because they're awful right wingers. You know, it's because they changed their minds on this. And traditionally, the Republicans were less interventionalist than Democrats. I think what changed for Republicans like Coulter, Ingram, so on, was 9-11.

9-11 changed the way that people were talking about, you know, intervening in foreign countries and starting foreign wars. And I understand that because I was at Fox News during that time, time too and i was just scared like so many others in the country it was such a big deal you know i know you've talked about it too um that just the whole mind mindset changed to like get him get him kill him there so they don't kill us here it was like a newfound war footing and so people sounded a lot more hawkish within the Republican Party and were than they had been. And you always had outliers who were like Glenn. He was always like, no, this is bullshit. What are we doing? Right. Glenn Greenwald and some others. He was never a conservative. I'm just saying like he saw reason the whole time. But I think once that security

threat died down somewhat and we saw the damage, right, that had just the carnage on our own country, on our own blood and treasure and how it didn't really work out so great in those countries. I mean, reasonable people reassess and they look at their choices and say, did that work for us? Exactly the thing we're talking about right now with the Democrats not doing right. They're just going to be like victory. We'll do it exactly the same way the next time. I think these Republicans are sort of saying, you know, that wasn't right. We have to learn the lessons that were taught to us. And there's so many profound costs that are hard to exactly measure. But, you know, you think just of the fact that, look, the George W. Bush administration and the evangelical right wing in this country went

all in on the war in Iraq. And that cost them tremendous political capital. And now you look around where like the left wing controls every single like institution. And you're like, yeah, well, it's not so great that you went all in on this disaster. Even though the left wing all voted for the Iraq war too. Well, well, yeah, certainly in the senate uh some of them in the house not as much but you're absolutely right about that but i'm talking more about the people who supported it rather than the politicians but the other thing that i think right-wingers are are realizing now is that one of the creepiest things and the biggest threats to this country right now is that the war on terrorism is being turned inward and the target is right wingers in this really twisted, sick irony.

Many of the people who supported the creation of the war on terror now find themselves, you know, realizing that like, yeah, well, when you give the government this power that you create the Department of Homeland Security, you create all of these terrorist provisions, you create these spying apparatuses. That is an awful lot of power to to give the government. And you ignore a lot of lessons of history when you do that. So that's hopefully there's a lesson that can be learned in all of that. Now, I've read that you were raised by a Democratic mom. Right. She was she was sort of classic.

She was a liberal Democrat. And so and you just said you were Democrat for most of your life until your your rendezvous with Ron and sort of opening your mind to libertarianism. And I was I was just wondering, like, is your mom still a Democrat or what's the you know, what's this? Is she still around? And is she still a Democrat? She's yeah, she's still around and is she still a Democrat? Yeah, she's still around and I'm sure she's still registered as a Democrat, but she really is.

She, I think, probably has stayed the same while all the other left liberals around her have changed. So I think that she is appalled by the insanity of the left, particularly over the last couple years. But she's really, I think, appalled by probably a lot of the same things that I am and that you are. But I don't know. I think she's like a lifelong Democrat. And when you were asking me, to me, I just grew up in that environment. So it was just like a given. It's not like I ever even really examined it. It was just like, well, obviously, you'd want obviously you'd want you'd tax millionaires more because they don't need the money as much as other people. My nana and my mom used to say, we're not Republicans are for the rich. We're not rich. We're Democrats. Democrats are for the middle class and the

working class. And that, you know, bringing us back to how we kicked off the rich. We're not rich. We're Democrats. Democrats are for the middle class and the working class. And that, you know, bringing us back to how we kicked off the discussion. But yeah, same because in my family, we were technically registered Democrats, but we were never political. Like we were never we never even watched the evening news, Dave. We had on the Jeffersons. And then after after my dad died, my mom had on episodes of the Golden Girls. And we I love the Golden Girls to this day because it brings me back. And by the way, did you know that those two women on the show were calling Betty White the C word? Bea Arthur and Rue McClanahan. I don't know if you saw that headline, but I was like, what? They were the only two who didn't like Betty White. I did not know that, but I loved that show.

It was so good. Blanche and Dorothy. Yeah, Dorothy was B. Arthur. So you know what I mean? We weren't we. Yeah, you got to pick something because you want to vote. But there's a difference between being a registered Democrat and being truly political. Oh, yeah, absolutely. So I think for me, I was never super political. It was just like kind of a given like, well, yeah, I'm not one of the evil, greedy Republicans. So I'm a liberal, you know? And it wasn't until, it was during the George W. Bush years, I was really opposed to everything he was doing. And then, so that just kind of kept me in that liberal world. But Ron Paul was the first guy who kind of offered me an alternative where it was like, oh, there's this other way of looking at the world that's

really fascinating that no one ever taught me about. It's like no one ever bothered to even mention these ideas. Then he was talking about things like the Federal Reserve and the government control of money and how much this distorts the economy and how this is all a big kind of scheme that enriches the big banks and enriches the powerful corporations. And it does nothing but harm the middle class and the working class. And I'll tell you, I think right now today, we're living through a lot of that, too. I mean, I really believe if you go back and listen to what Ron Paul was saying in 2007, 2008 and all the way up since then, I mean, it's unbelievable how much he's been proven right on. And he was not taken seriously by. Oh, no, he was killed. They went after.

I remember that debate. Fox News was hosting that debate. It was Brigham, Chris Wallace and Wendell Goler, if memory serves. I'm really taxing myself now. Anyway, they they he was the thing I remember. He was saying something like, you've got to look at how our interventions overseas have come back to haunt us, you know, and kind of making the case that 9-11 didn't happen in a vacuum. He wasn't trying to justify anything bin Laden did, but he was trying to say, let's let's try to understand it by the foreign policy decisions we have made and how we would react if somebody had done it to our country. And every Republican on the stage was like, you know, I think we at Fox News were different than everybody else. And the mainstream all turns on them. And maybe those people are nutcases. Or maybe they're just people who have really good ideas and have read again. I looked it up. Todd Rose's book, Collective Illusions. He's the one on my show saying saying like, maybe your views aren't so minority. Maybe they are majority because people are afraid to espouse them. Right. So it's like Joe Rogan will engage with those people and he doesn't pronounce them correct about all things at the end. Served him very well for all these years until he ran headfirst into the there shall be no COVID misinformation dispersed in any corner. You know, the mainstream elitist media has dictated as such.

And then they came for him and they failed. But they came or they failed so far. Let's hope the failure continues. But let's start with how it's been, what you think over the past week, because I know you've been with him. You guys have been doing comedy together. Like how he's been behind the scenes.

He's been great. I mean, it's really funny because people, you know, like people who don't know Joe personally, I mean, and if they don't listen to his show, because I think the people who listen to his show really do know him personally. But I'm sure the people who don't could Joe personally. I mean, and if they don't listen to his show, cause I think the people listening to his show really do know him personally. Um, but I'm sure the people who don't could just see like, Oh, he's like, you know, he's a, he's a comedian at nightclubs and he's the, like the cage fighting commentator. But if you talk to anybody who knows Joe Rogan, he is a, one of the most genuine, sweet, humble people you'll ever meet. And he's, he's a guy who's like, he's done a lot

of, um, he's a very self-aware person does a lot of like meditating and thinking and has conversations with a lot of really interesting people. And he knows who he is. I mean, I was really impressed just how, um, I really admire just how he's handled this whole situation. He was not rattled. He's very sure of who he is. He also has a really lovely family. He's got a really great life. I think he's very grounded. So it was great doing shows with him. And I did the podcast that just got released yesterday with him. And yeah, it's very interesting as you watch the corporate press go after Joe Rogan with no self-reflection about why it is that this guy is so much bigger than you and so much more trusted than you. There's these CNN shows that are ripping on him with a 20th of the audience.

Yeah. Brian Stelter sitting there, well, why is it that people trust him? And it's like, well, how much do you think you can get wrong before people stop trusting you? I mean, if you really take a step back and just look at the 21st century, what's been handed to the American people, and of course, all the wars that we were just alluding to, these are real people. People have sent their children over to these wars. You know what I mean? Who have been killed or maimed or come back a shell of their former self. This is real. In 2008, we had the worst economic recession in almost 100 years. After that, they had the Obama administration, disaster after disaster. Then Donald Trump, they're so furious at the system, Donald Trump gets in. And then, you know, a couple years later,

you have this COVID regime and lockdowns and restrictions and all of this. This has not been a good opening 20 years to the century. And the corporate press has sold all of this, this has not been a good opening 20 years to the century. And the corporate press has sold all of these policies. Why do you think it is that trust has evaporated? It makes perfect sense. And they don't even attempt to look in the mirror and go, hmm, maybe we didn't really cover the working class and the middle class just getting totally demolished over the last 20 years. It's like they never listened to what was appealing about Donald Trump. What was appealing about Donald Trump to the working class wasn't the things that they'd harp on. Listen to what

he said. He said, I'm going to bring your jobs back. Now, he didn't. He never really had a plan for it. He wasn't a good president, in my opinion. But that was the pitch. No one else was even talking to those people. Well, how can you say that? Because we had record low unemployment. I mean, the economy was booming under Trump. Wages went up for lower. Yes, wages went up for the working class. I just had Jason Reilly on who has a brand new book on this whole thing for blacks, for Latinos. I'm like, Donald Trump, listen, I recognize his character flaws, trust me. But as a president, when it comes to policy, he actually did do a lot of good for the economy in particular. Well, there were a couple of good things. I mean, I thought the tax cuts

were very good. I wish he had gone a little bit further with them, but they were the corporate tax cuts were pretty drastic. And I think that really did help with the economy. But the problem is that, and this is true all through the Obama years, this is basically true from when Obama took office all the way up till now, is that the way we've created these, quote, booming economies and had the stock market looking pretty good and even unemployment numbers looking pretty good under Donald Trump, is that we've had record high government spending and record low artificially controlled interest rates. The spending's not a problem. Not going to argue with you there. But so what you have in this situation, right, when you have the interest rates being held

like near 0% by the Federal Reserve, is that you have these crazy speculating, you know, because people can't save money. So people on a fixed income get hit. But then you have record high profits in wall street. And then you have, of course, record, you know, um, high, uh, profits for the politically connected. And so you can make that look nice on a chart. Um, but look at where the richest counties in America are. They're all right outside of Washington, DC and New York city. This is, This is not helping the working class. That's fascinating. There's so much I want to dissect there.

I mean, it started with our discussion about Joe Rogan and why he's getting it. I'll start there because whenever you make that point, whenever I hear somebody sort of make the point that you should be following Joe Rogan, these sort of the mainstream doofuses who are like, I didn't get it. We're real journalists. They should be following him or at least questioning why he's so popular in a way that they can emulate as opposed to just condemning him and trying to cancel him. And I always picture Brian Stelter. I picture him without his shirt on. Walk with me. Throw it, Dave. I picture him without his shirt on, literally gazing at his navel and kind of playing with his navel and like being like, I don't get it. Why would they like Joe Rogan? Why not me? CNN's a real journalist. That's sort of how I picture it. It's that clueless navel gazing. Hello, open your eyes. Listen to what the American people are telling you. And it's disgusting how they'll use anything to tear you down. And truly, he's kind of an example in how even if you're of the left, because his politics are more lefty, they'll come for you, especially if you're not woke. If you're left and not woke, you can F right the hell off. You're the enemy. And he definitely falls within that category, right? A Bernie supporter who's not woke, done, canceled. A, that's the wrong lefty. B, you have to be woke. C,

even if you are all those things, we'll probably cancel you anyway. Yeah. Well, the thing that's really interesting is that the woke stuff, although much of it originated from left-wing thinkers in college campuses, like critical race theory and stuff like that. But when you see it really being pushed by all of the giant corporations, it's being pushed by the CIA and by the Federal Reserve and by really powerful government institutions. And there's a reason for that. And I think that they benefit very much from left-wing outrage being targeted at Aunt Jemima or what somebody said one time. Maybe someone made a comment about Halloween costumes or something. Really, the outrage of the day. But you don't see them targeting that at record high banker profits. You don't see them

targeting that at declining standards for the middle class and rising standards for the corporate elite, things that the left would typically care about. All of the energy has been sucked up by these really stupid, I mean, on what level do you really place this? And one of the things that's interesting that Rogan is completely open to talking about is real things that never get covered by the corporate press. I mean, we were talking a bunch when I was on the show about how you have these think tanks that push for military intervention that are funded by weapons companies. It's like, hmm, what's going on there? How come you will never, ever see a story about that on CNN or MSNBC or Fox News for that matter? None of them. I don't know. I mean, Meet the Press was brought to you this week by Boeing. I don't know, but I don't seem to ever, ever see mention of this. So while they kind of try to pretend that this is like the fake news on the Internet, this is all the disinformation.

It's like, I don't know, from from where I'm sitting, there are these really big, important stories that the corporate press is just just refuses to cover. You know, that's really interesting, because one of the things that's amazing about Joe Rogan to me is he's entirely self-made. Even when he was moving up the ranks in the numbers and the downloads, you didn't see him all over Fox News or CNN or anywhere else accepting profiles. He doesn't do it. He doesn't do that. Every single download he has, he's earned organically and it drives the mainstream insane because they can't say the same it drives them nuts and i think it drives even some fellow comedians nuts because trevor noah of all people went for rogan um he he went for him and uh national review did a great piece on this

charles cw cook just just talked about trevor noah just saying this is just disgusting what he did um rogan defended trevor noah when the mob dug up his old comedy routines which sounded kind of sexist and kind of racist. And this is Rogan's tweet at the time. Too much for 140 characters, but nothing he said was out of line. And he's a funny dude. F the haters, Noah. That's how he responded when Trevor Noah got in trouble. Here's how Trevor Noah responded when Joe Rogan just got attacked last week. Soundbite six. What I found particularly illuminating is when he says, I wasn't being racist. I was just being entertaining. No, Joe, I think you were using racism to be entertaining. You understand what I'm saying? I'm not saying you were trying to offend black people, by the way, but you knew

that offending black people would get a laugh out of those white friends that you were with. He's going after him, Dave. Yeah. And it's like even even this idea of, you know, well, I think he was using racism to be entertaining. It's like, OK, I mean, he's a professional comedian and one of the absolute best in the world. Like, go, I don't know, go look at Pryor or Carlin or Chris Rock or Dave Chappelle or South Park or like any great comedy. Like, yeah, okay, sure. They use issues of race and they create beautiful, hilarious moments with it. But the idea that he's actually, nobody, nobody, including Trevor Noah, believes that Joe Rogan is a racist person.

None of them. They're all just posturing. And you could have gone back to say about Trevor Noah, oh, he is just he is just using misogyny for humor, right? Because this is it was Charles C.W. Cook. He called him a moral disgrace for this behavior here among the Trevor Noah jokes that he was getting hit for. He wrote or he said, originally, when men proposed, they went down on one knee. So if the woman said no, they were in the perfect uppercut position. He said behind every successful rap billionaire is a double as a rich Jewish man.

He said Messi gets the ball and the real players try to foul him. But Messi doesn't go down easily, just like Jewish chicks. And this is Charles's point. He says if if they so wished, other comedians could have responded to Noah's explanation by saying when Trevor Noah says I wasn't being sexist or anti-Semitic. I was just being entertaining, they could have responded by saying, no, I think you were using sexism and anti-Semitism to try to be entertaining. That his false offense, right? It's false. I don't believe Trevor Noah thinks Joe Rogan's a racist.

I think he wants to virtue signal to his woke audience that he's their champion. He's with them. He's holier than thou. He's noble. Joe Rogan's not. And underlying all of it is a deep seed of envy. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And I think that this it's like if you want to play this game, like as you're showing, you can play this with just about anyone who's been a comedian, particularly longer than for the last five years or six years when these rules got written. You know, and and of course, you see a lot of this online where, you know, and it's kind of interesting to see where these things get pushed and where they don't. Like, you know, if you want to go down, say, Howard Stern's hit list, you're going to get a lot worse stuff than you're going to get with Joe Rogan.

But of course, Howard Stern is telling everyone to take their vaccine and stay home and follow all of the regime edicts. And so you don't see a big push from the corporate press to take him down. So I think people, this is why Rogan's audience is so big and theirs is so tiny. It's like people are onto this. You know, it's, it's a really interesting world. Like, you know, and, and like Megan, you've, you've seen it, right? I mean, now you're doing this show now and you can just do it. You can do the serious show. You can have it online.

This is new. I mean, this wasn't around in the 2012 election, which is not that long ago, just going back 10 years, you know, in the 2012 election, there was no just like podcast that was 10 times bigger than the corporate press. Even when I was leaving Fox News in 2000, it was late 16. And I was deciding, what do I want to do? I don't want to keep doing this. So what do I do? Even then, this wasn't yet a realistic option for just anybody. You know, it wasn't like, okay, you know, a journalist like, like me, what could I wind up there? Could I make something happen there? It wasn't until my pal

Ben Shapiro came to me in 19, January of 19, around there and said, MK, you should consider this. This is a real business model. Showed me the whole thing. I was like, holy shit, he's right. I'll say one thing about Howard, though. I'm sure he said it very fast. He did. He said it super fast and in a very smart way. Howard, all of his stuff was out there. He's like, there's no one who's been out more outrageous than Howard Stern. Nobody. I mean, find me somebody in the public airways who's been more outrageous than Howard. He owned it. He never tried to like make a secret out of it. So it's like, I don't know that you can drudge that up and use it against him because maybe they'll try.

It was so long ago and he doesn't do that stuff anymore. And maybe it is that he's more left leaning in his politics that they won't come for it. But they do. They came for Whoopi. They love to bring down anybody who's rich and powerful. I just think Howard's going to be tough because it's like a man who starts in a movie called Fartman is tough to bring down with scandal. I know. I agree. I agree. There's there's private parts, whatever it was.

But he did, too. Yes. I think that was a character. It was. No, he did. Private parts. Whatever. Yes.

And Fartman was a character. Well, no, he did private parts. Whatever. Yes. And Fartman was a character. Anyway, he opened up like some reward ceremony as Fartman coming down with the, you know, from the ceiling. It was crazy. You can't be more outrageous than Howard himself. And just to be clear, I mean, I don't believe in any of this. I don't want to see Howard Stern canceled or I don't want to see, you know, Jimmy Kimmel canceled or Joe Rogan or Whoopi Goldberg. I mean, like, I think all of this is insane. And I think it's like, first off,

comedians make jokes. The spirit of a joke, whether you like it or not, is to try to get the room full of people to laugh. That is not a malicious intent. That is not something that's done. You're not allowed to talk about intent. Intent doesn't matter anymore, Dave. All that matters is effect, is offense, right? That's it. That's what we've been told by sort of the woke brigade for years. And that's why it's so interesting to listen to Whoopi defend herself with the ADL guy based on intent. She didn't intend to offend anybody. recircled because Don Jr. went on her show and outed the fact that she had done blackface and that ABC celebrated it on the air as recently as 2016. They put her picture in blackface on the air. Remember the time you were the beautiful African woman without anyone batting an eyelash that she said, oh, well, I intended it as an homage. And that was fine. Meanwhile, you know, I was over there on NBC saying, does it matter that this real housewife was trying to honor Diana Ross? Should that matter? The intent? Get out, devil, racist, right? It's like, there is no consistent standard.

Yeah. And then it kind of allows, it's very convenient that way. It allows people to kind of like, you know, decide who gets hit with this and to what degree they get hit with. And I will agree with you that there is something, there's something really infuriating about the people who are like, well, no, but not Whoopi Goldberg, because we like her. And you're like, no, listen, there's there has to be one standard here. But I would prefer that the standard be that we don't all act like a bunch of hyperventilating children and allow adults to say things. And, you know, even occasionally that might mean something offensive, but you know, like there are so many things like examples today were like,

obviously your example that even if you thought it was offensive, which I really didn't, it was mildly offensive at worst. And I kind of feel the same way about what Whoopi Goldberg said. I mean, I'm Jewish. My grandfather was a Holocaust survivor, but I didn't find it a fact. I just thought it was like that was kind of inaccurate. She doesn't really know what she's talking about. Whatever. It's not like she said something like she didn't say, I hate Jewish people and I'm glad that happened to them or something. People love to get on their fainting couches. You know, it's like, get off of your fainting couch.

You're not fooling anyone. And I do think in the case of, well, Whoopi is one, I was another, and Joe Rogan's another, we're was in the news, because the people were getting canceled and in trouble for doing something that I accurately observed did not cause as big a stink back in the 70s and the 80s. And then I would later find out even on NBC, which was airing blackface programs within two or three years of the conversation I had. But the point is, if you're in the business of having conversations about culture, about dicey issues, right? Race, religion, all these changes that we're having on gender and so on. How I'm just going to say it. I've said it before. But how the fuck are you supposed to understand what exactly the guard the guardrails are? Right.

Like stay perfectly within them. You cannot have those meaningful conversations on NBC morning show on The View. You can't do it the guardrails don't work for truly honest and indeed provocative conversations which is why one of the many reasons why I'm so much happier being independent it's too stifling and it's a failing doomed business model yeah well I feel the same way I love being like a a common comic and like commentator who's I do my podcasts and I do other podcasts and I do I self produce all of my comedy and like it's just I don't want to have some corporate job. I don't want to work like that. That's so tragic about all of this is that like, there are issues that really affect vulnerable people and vulnerable populations. Like I use this example sometimes, but you know, if you're on the Amtrak from New York to Washington, DC,

which every single person in the corporate press has been on, like everyone's been on that train. They know the train, the exact train that they everyone's been on that train. They know the exact train. They all have been on the Xcela from New York to Washington, D.C. because those are the two like kind of centers. When you come out of the Baltimore station and you look at downtown Baltimore, you see like crumbling buildings. Like, I mean, like just like the and this is an area that's like basically 100% African-American. The schools are abomination. Me or you would kill before we would allow our children to be educated in that environment.

Drugs are rampant. Crime is rampant. Like everything is just, it's like a little third world country in the middle of America. And the people there are really suffering. There's little kids who are like growing up like that. And none of this does anything to even pretend to help them. Well, let's be honest. No one's run by Democrats. It has been for years, as is the state. You can say the same for Chicago, San Francisco, which is going downhill by the minute, that there are real policy problems that have led to that result. And you're right. That's right. That's that's the left's reason for

wanting to talk about all this woke shit more than they want to talk about their actual policies. And it's something I don't know. I don't know that they'll ever get honest on it. I don't I don't know. I'm not sure what it'll take. More with Dave Smith right after this fascinating conversation, don't you think? Back to the serious problems plaguing several American cities. I mean, it's not just the blight. And I lived in Baltimore for a year, a long time ago, but it was when I was first starting in TV. And it was a disaster. It was like a cute neighborhood right along the water. And other than that, it's just a mess. And the crime was high even then. I remember I moved in, I saw a cop standing on the corner and I said to him, I'm going to make it through the year without getting shot or mugged or attacked or hurt, right? And he goes, you should.

What? A little higher degree. That's not very comforting. No, no, not at all. And you mentioned the spending. And that's a totally fair criticism against President Trump and especially against President Biden. It's been out of control. And I realize they're like COVID, COVID. And some of the COVID measures were were important. Right. Some people did need relief. The government took away their jobs.

They stopped them from being able to earn. So they owed those people some, but not ongoing, never ending checks, right? Like that turned out to be a real problem. And now what do we have after pumping $6 million, I wish, $6 trillion into the economy, at a time when we couldn't afford it and we'd already dumped so many during Trump, we have record high inflation. Now it's a new 40-year high. Every week we get another. It's a new high.

We've broken yet another record. So back to Lester and Joe. They had a little conversation about it, which you can see in full during the Super Bowl if you choose to watch. And as he has been doing lately, Joe Biden got a little testy. He really is kind of turning into the get off my lawn president. It wasn't it wasn't a big deal this time, but he didn't like the question. Here it is. I think it was back in July. You said inflation was going to be temporary.

I think a lot of Americans are wondering what your definition of temporary is. Well, you're being a wise guy with me a little bit. I understand that's your job. But look, at the time, what happened was the let's look at the reasons for the inflation. The reason for the inflation is the supply chains were cut off. When can Americans expect some relief from this soaring inflation? According to Nobel laureates, 14 of them that contacted me and a number of corporate leaders, it's hard to be able to start to taper off as we go through this year. Oh my God. Do you feel better? Because the 14 Nobel laureates say might ought to taper off.

What? I mean, that's worse than just saying, I don't know when. the 14 Nobel laureates say might ought to taper off? What? I mean, that's worse than just saying, I don't know when. Yeah. Well, that would be more honest. Certainly.

I like that. He calls him a wise guy. Like he's using insults out of the 1940s or something. It's just so bizarre. But look, how many of those 14 Nobel laureate economists saw the crash of 2008 coming? My guess would be zero of them. And I think that mainstream Keynesian economics is just so out of touch with reality at this point. And no, the supply chain did not cause the price inflation. The monetary inflation

is what's led directly to the price inflation. And many of us, myself included, I was talking all about this on my podcast. You can find this during March of 2020 and April of 2020, that the idea that we would lock down the economy, print trillions of dollars and distribute checks to people was guaranteeing that we were going to see price inflation coming in the next few years in a major way. And then every one of Biden's policies has just been to add to it. I mean, his energy policy, it's like, well, what do you think is going to happen here? You think this isn't going to make the cost of energy go up? So this is a very predictable consequence of what we've done

over the last couple of years. And I agree with you that if you're going to kick people out of work, you kind of incur some obligation to pay them. But the answer to that, the best answer is don't kick them out of work. And this is, you know, this is the bill is coming due. And when you talk about the government spending, I mean, look, obviously, the Democrats shoulder a lot of the blame for this, but the Republicans cannot get off the hook. I mean, they railed against Obama for his spending. And in 2016, they took over control of the House, the Senate and the presidency, and they increased spending. And at that point, it was just like that was. And of course, you know, George W. Bush did the same. He had the excuse, I guess, of 9-11. They have the excuse of COVID. Obama had the excuse of the Great Recession. There's always an excuse for it. It's never going to be- But Trump was spending before he had the excuse of COVID. That is very true. And so, yeah, it's like this is at some point there's going to become a real

issue where the dollar is going to lose confidence and which is the global reserve currency. This has huge ramifications. And the truth is that we cannot like we we spend well beyond our means. And the only reason we're able to do it is because people are loaning the American government money. And if people stop doing that, then this whole thing, you know, it's, it's a, it's a game of musical chairs and you do not want to be there when the music stops. So this is, this is a very, there's, there's a reason why for so long in the history of this country, we were on a gold standard and we, we were really, you know, like promoted the idea of,

of some fiscal sanity. This is is not this is how nations collapse under you know fiscal conditions like this and monetary conditions like that what's been amazing to me is the the inflation it continues to rise it's not going away it wasn't transitory you know all these lies get exposed um now some in the left-wing press which is you know i repeat myself um they're they're playing dumb like well what else could president obama have done what would trump have done differently chris hayes had a tweet like that i saw some from msnbc sort of trying to run cover for biden on this like who could have seen it coming and it's like well to your point you know your your podcast back in the spring of 2020 there was but there

were so many pundits who pay attention to monetary policy who didn't believe in this this monetary policy lie that we could just spend into oblivion and never ever have it come back to haunt us it's like the you know it's like women being told they can have endless brownies and you know what red wine and it's never going to show up in your belly. It's not true. It's not true, America. And we did see it coming. Well, and what's interesting, too, is that now, you know, it's it's one of these things that people feel like you can't you can't pretend it's not happening. I mean, like my my my wife talks to me about it all the time. And but I'm that she does like all like she knows everything. I'm I'm an idiot in every single regard except this.

Like I'm able to do this. But everything else, my wife takes care of me. I'd be like naked and alone and afraid if it wasn't for her. But she'll be talking to me all the time. And she's like, hey, you know, those organic strawberries, they were like four bucks. And now they're like 750. And, you know, this is like I mean, the prices of everything are just going through the roof. I forget you need a used car right now. Forget that. Yeah. I mean, and so people, and this is again, back to kind of the thing we were talking about

at the top of the show, who does this really hurt? I mean, it's not as if like millionaires and billionaires as Bernie Sanders likes to say, or just billionaires these days, but it's not as if they are really like, oh no, you know, the cost of living went up a little bit. But for working class people, this absolutely destroys them. I mean, it's, and so, you know, we have these policies supposedly in the name of, oh, well, we have to cut these checks to, you know, help people out. And then the inflation ends up wiping away everything that they got and more. So it's really it's very bad for people in the middle or lower ends of the economy. And to see Joe Biden, I mean, he's clearly never even begun to think about

monetary policy. Well, that's why the wise guy comment is obnoxious, because it's like, no, you predicted this. You said this in July. It wasn't true. There are people whose ability to put food on their table depends upon these prices going back down, settling. Right. Where's the accountability? He's saying, do you hold yourself accountable? And what what can you tell these people? And he's so glib. He just blows it off. Everything on him is a political hit job. You're a wise guy. To your point about the 1940s, they're almost expecting the fake punch, like, buster, right? It's like, no, this is serious. I mean, my mom's, I've said this before, my mom is in this category. She's on a fixed income. She's 80. Of course, I help her out. So

she's not in the same position that most are. But I understand she doesn't like to take my money. So she she'd much rather do it with her own retirement, her own pension and Social Security. She worked hard her whole life. She doesn't like taking from others. What choice does she and do the others have now with prices rising to this like 40 year record highs? And he's laughing it off like he's the victim attacked by, you know, the evil Lester Holt. Yeah. And of course, you know, everybody around Joe Biden and everybody in the corporate press, I mean, none of them really are in that situation. I mean, wouldn't it kind of be interesting almost like if you if you had one like, you know, I'm a pure capitalist. I have nothing against people making money.

But wouldn't it be interesting if there was like one anchor of one show on cable news who like made $60,000 a year? Maybe they'd want to talk about a lot of different issues. Well, yeah, right. But then like you might hear about a lot of different issues, and you do hear about different issues when you watch the local news. You hear a lot about like the crime that's going on up the block or the, or, or prices at the grocery store. Cause this is like, these are people who actually live through that, the implications of these policies. And, um, you know, again, and, and I do think that this was, this was true during the entire Obama administration and true during the entire Trump

administration is that, you know, they measure these things by like, well, I mean, the stock market's doing good. And even, even the unemployment numbers, I mean, are completely misleading. I mean, they don't count people. They don't count people who have dropped out of looking for work and they don't, they have no measure. Like if you're, you know, if, if you're have some, you know, if you're an executive and you lose your job and then you get a job at Starbucks, there's no change in the unemployment numbers, but like there's a pretty profound change in that person's life. I created 7 million jobs. It's like what you did was just replace the jobs. Like those are people who were pushed out of the workforce during the COVID lockdowns who are now working again that you didn't create anything.

Right. And then with those like 400,000 small businesses that close their doors for good, if those people go again and get some job at a restaurant or something, it's okay. That's a new job created. But that's not exactly like the damage has been undone. All right. I got to leave it at that because we're out of time. Last question. Bengals or Rams? Who are you rooting for? I'm a Jet fan, so I will be sad no matter what happens always. That's guaranteed. Right, as per usual. I guess Rams. So a ringing endorsement. Dave, what a pleasure. I hope you come back. I would love to. Thank you so much, Megan.

I got some sad news for you. Just hit the wires that Jim Angle died. Longtime Fox News correspondent and anchor. 75 years old. They're not releasing a cause of death right now, but he was among the best and brightest. Class act and dear, dear man and friend. Wow, he'll be missed. I want to tell you about next week before I let you go. Enjoy the weekend. We have an exclusive interview with Michelle Tafoya, who leaves NBC Sports after the Super Bowl on Sunday and is free to speak her mind. She'll do it right here. Looking forward to

that. And as if that were not enough goodness, we've got Victor Davis Hanson-Jones in the show on Monday, who we always love and our viewers love. So please, in the meantime, download The Megyn Kelly Show so you won't miss it subscribe at youtube.com slash megan kelly and have a great weekend thanks for listening to the megan kelly show no bs no agenda and no fear